Life On The Race Is Not Always Easy

I’m going to make that statement clear right now. Life on the race is only 20% of the cool adventure posts the World Race shares. It’s still life, there’s still struggles and rough days and hard ministries and conflict. There’s days when you wake up exhausted and it’s a struggle to choose to be joyful and have the right attitude. 

Yesterday was a somewhat rough day. Don’t get me wrong, I greatly enjoyed ministry yesterday. The struggle came with being overwhelmed. 

Quiet time is a priority for me. Each morning I wake up and spend an hour or two studying the Scriptures and in prayer. It just helps me start my day off well. Yesterday, however I didn’t get to really finish my quiet time before starting ministry and that set me up for hard situations for the rest of the day. 

I spent 12 hours yesterday with 13 Americans from Judson College in Chicago. They’re here for a one week mission trip and so our teams are working together. They are an awesome group of individuals, but they’re also very loud. 

Now, when I say loud I don’t mean unusually loud, because they are normal on the American scale. However, I’ve spent the last 8 months in countries that are a very quiet culture and Americans are considered extremely loud and, more often than not, rude and obnoxious. 

From my squad’s very first experience, we worked on being quiet and respectful to the cultures we were in. The first couple of months I’m sure we failed at it, but it was a growing experience. When my squad gets together even now, we still get loud, but I didn’t realize how much quieter we had all grown and how much better we had gotten with our volume until yesterday.

Spending the day with the Judson team, I was constantly surrounded by their loud volume and it was extremely overwhelming. My anxiety levels went up and my energy was drained so much faster that by the time I was just with my team at 10 that night even the slightest raise in volume was stretching my limit and making me want to shut down.

I am sharing this not only because it’s a struggle I am experiencing but also because I know it’s one I’ll face coming back to the States in August. I’ll be coming back to the loud culture and it is going to be overwhelming. It’s something I’m not entirely looking forward to in all honesty.

 

So, just a helpful hint, when you go on an international vacation or missions trip, try to keep your volume down to be respectful of the culture. 

 

Till Next Time, 

Kara Faber